Guinness Facts

Guinness: 5 Things You Didn't Know

In 1759, Arthur Guinness, a 34-year-old man with some brewing experience, took over an abandoned brewery in Dublin, Ireland, named St. James Gate. He signed a 9,000-year lease with an annual rent of £45, and began to brew.

A full 250 years later, Guinness is the No. 1 stout in the world, and an enduring symbol of Irish pride. The success of the beer owes as much to its unique aesthetics and long history of award-winning advertising campaigns as it does to its creamy, robust flavor.

And as is St Patrick's Day wasn't enough of a celebration to the creamy drink, Guinness have even cultivated the Irish "Arthur's Day", when Guinness lovers raise a unifying global toast to the man who started it all.

To commemorate both beer, man, and St Patrick, we present five things you didn't know about Guinness.

1. Arthur Guinness never brewed a stoutThe first thing you didn't know about Guinness is that although his name is practically synonymous with a stout, Arthur Guinness himself never technically brewed one. Beer connoisseurs might accuse us of splitting hairs between porters and stouts; however, during his first couple decades in business he brewed an ale, and in the 1770s, as porters caught on in Dublin, he began brewing one himself. In 1799, he fully committed the brewery to porters — which is where things stood when he died four years later.

In 1821, his son Arthur Guinness II established the recipe for a Guinness Extra Superior Porter, the precursor to the Guinness stout known worldwide today.

2. Three of the five Guinness breweries are in AfricaAlthough Guinness is brewed in 49 countries and sold in 150, Guinness itself owns five breweries worldwide, including St. James Gate in Dublin. One is in Malaysia, and the rest are in Africa, specifically in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon. In fact, Nigeria and Cameroon are among the top five markets for Guinness in the world.

However, the Guinness variant popular in Ireland, the UK and the U.S. is not the popular one in Africa, where they prefer the Guinness Extra Foreign Stout, a variant with a much higher alcohol content (7.5%) than the draft (around 4.0%).